52 ,,-::::: :'::: :':"': :.:.;;';-:,::::': TULANé W HEN I was ten years old, my parents decided that it was time I came down to NashvIlle to stay. Most of my life I had boarded i " with cousins and gone to school in a small town in Kentucky. Both my .:::::' ".' ::::. mother and father worked, and my mother felt that it was impossible to '. :'" maintain a normal home for me. Also, the city was not considered a good place to bring up children. That summer my mother had a serious illness, which made -- :,;;. it necessary for her to give up her work and stay home, and so they sent for me. They had taken a big flat in an apart- ment building called the Polk, which ... : ,. was halfway down the hilt from the State Capitol and stood on the site of the ,:.; James K. Polk mansion. The tomb of President Polk drowsed under a mul- berry tree in a corner of the front lawn. Across the street was the governor's mansion. Up in the Capitol sat Gov- -- ernor Ham Patterson, writing pardons for all the crooks in the penitentiary and con triving wicked things to do to Sena- tor Carmack, who was the Samuel Sea- bury of his day and locale, and greatly admired by my parents. I t was a week or so before school started when I arrived in Nashville, and I spent a good deal of time wandering around the Capitol grounds. I got ac- quainted with a boy named Pete up there, and one day he took me to see a haunted house not far away. It was a big, red brick house on a corner . It was old and run-down, with hardly a window unbroken, and all around it were Negroes' shacks, but even a boy could see that it had been a very fine mansion in its day. Pete threw a rock through a window and then said, "Listen. Hear that?" And I thought I heard a noise like a girl . " Th ' h h " moanIng. at s t e g ost, Pete said. I said I had to hurry home to supper. Pete walked along with me and told me how a man had mur- dered his wife in that house and it got haunted and nobody had lived there since. He said the man had cut the woman's throat with a butcher knife. [ ::x: ':'.": :.":' :.:-: ::: : :1 .':':' ::.::=: fr: .. ::: .. ::::.: :::=: .;.:. t ::::::' l1 .' ,:?:'::."o:: :: !! a______ D OWN at the bottom of the hill was one of the two big hotels in Nashville-the Tulane. I was preju- diced against the Tulane. When Wil- liam Jennings Bryan was defeated for President in 1 908, the Republicans had their headquarters there, and that night they had a big parade that started out from the hotel. At that age I could be- lieve nothing good of a hotel that would Gty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . State. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . L t r o:.a e:'t:. :: ..J --:, ' ', ; :': .. . -. Take time to relax on a t , þ , Get away from it all - jar away. 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I WANT TO PAY, PER PERSON, PER WEEK, about $40 0 about $50 0 about $65 0 I PREFER A RANCH LOCATED On the plains 0 In the mountains 0 An operating ranch 0 I WANT A RANCH THAT FEATURES Fishing 0 Riding 0 Participation in ranch routine 0 Pack trips 0 Swimming 0 Programmed activity 0 "Do-as-you-please" 0 Name ........................................ Address ...................................... put Up Republicans, and I was quite certain that if Booker T. Washington should come to Nashville, they would let him stay at the Tulane, too. The shortest way to school was right by the entrance to the Tulane Hotel. One morning Pete and I were walking along with our books under our arms. We had just turned the Tulane corner when Pete yelled "Watch out! There he is!" and started running. I caught up with him and asked him what was the matter. Pete said, "Don't you know? That was Tulane." I looked back and saw a one-horse hack pulling up to the door of the hotel and some people get- ting out. It looked like a grocery wagon, all covered so that you couldn't see in- side, and it was black all over, except for the words "TULANE HOTEL" painted in large yellow letters on the sides. I had seen it before. It met the trains at the Union Depot and brought up the people who were going to stay at the hotel. I said, "What are you running for? That's just the old hack that meets the trains." Pete looked at me pityingly. "You mean you don't know about old Tulane?" he said. "No," I said. Then Pete told me all about him. Tulane was the fellow that drove the hack. He was called that, Pete said, because nobody knew his real name. He was an old man with yellow skin and lots of scars, like pockmarks, on his face. He looked like a yellow nigger, Pete said, but he wasn't; he was a voodoo witch and he tried to catch boys like us. Pete said he had known several boys who got caught by Tulane, and the last anybody ever saw of them was when they got dragged into the hack. I asked Pete what Tulane did with the boys, and he said didn't I know that voodoos were cannibals. I saw Tulane again a few days later, when I was alone. As I came in sight of the hotel en trance, there he was, sitting on the marble steps. I saw that he had a wooden leg, that he was heavy-set and very ugly, and that his clothes were all black. His skin was a different color from any- body's I had ever seen before. It was like lemon-colored ashes and it was how I imagined dead people would look. I crossed to the other side of the street and walked very fast, so he wouldn't see me. Just as I reached the corner, he got up from the steps. I knew he was after me and I ran into the drug- store there. The man behind the coun- ter said, "What's the matter, young man?" I said, "Nothing," and bought